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Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Wind (MGM, 1928)

The film was The Wind,
a 1928 silent starring Lillian Gish (it was her “Summer Under the Stars” night
on TCM and they showed some of her movies for D. W. Griffith — including Intolerance,
Broken Blossoms and Orphans of
the Storm — as well as her three late
silents for MGM, La Bohème and The
Scarlet Letter as well as this one) and
Lars Hanson (a Swedish import and the only person who made films with Greta
Garbo both in Sweden and the
U.S.). I’d seen it before about 20 years ago on TNT back when that was Ted Turner’s big movie channel (it showed the
films with commercial breaks but often dug up material as obscure as what’s
been put on TCM: I remember recording the 1931 version of The Maltese
Falcon from TNT and that being my reference
version for that film until I bought the special edition of the 1941 version,
which had the 1931 Maltese Falcon
and 1936 Satan Met a Lady as
bonuses) and been quite impressed by it; it’s an overwhelming movie though also
a quite depressing one. The version TCM showed was one prepared by Thames
Television in the U.K., complete with an orchestral score by Carl Davis and a
videotaped introduction by the aged Lillian Gish saying that for the three
films she did for MGM at the close of the silent era, La Bohème and The Scarlet Letter (both 1926) as well as The Wind, all were projects she brought to the studio and persuaded MGM production
chief Irving Thalberg to greenlight.

The Wind began life as a novel by Dorothy Scarborough about a
young woman named Letty who leaves her home in Virginia to move out West (the
synopsis on imdb.com says the setting is West Texas but I don’t recall the film
itself being that specific; all we know about the location is it’s somewhere in
the West, cattle-raising is the chief business and fierce winds blow through
there almost constantly) and live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle) on
what she’s been told is his beautiful ranch. Needless to say, she’s
disappointed when she sees the reality; she’s taken from the train station by
locals Lige (Lars Hanson) and Sourdough (William Orlamond), who constantly have
shooting contests to determine everything from who gets to sit up front in the
carriage with Letty to which one gets to propose marriage to her. On the train
going out there Letty met up with cattle baron Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love,
virtually the only person in the cast besides Gish whose career continued into
the sound era), and of course he falls in lust at first sight with her while
she thinks he’s too creepy to bother with. Once she arrives at Beverly’s shack
in the middle of windy nowhere she’s spooked by the wind, while Beverly’s wife
Cora (Dorothy Cumming) takes an instant dislike to her. Beverly assures Cora
that Letty is just his cousin, and that his cough is getting better — a
carefully planted clue which Scarborough and the screenwriter, the redoubtable
Frances Marion (who was especially good at stories like this which cast their
principal characters in extreme conditions and forced them to fight it out),
bank for later use. There’s a big square dance that’s suddenly interrupted by a
cyclone — as if it isn’t windy enough in those parts normally! The cyclone is
quite convincing — I suspect MGM’s effects department made it out of a wind
sock the way they did in The Wizard of Oz 11 years later — and most of the people leave the hall and hide out in
the storm cellar under the building, but Beverly stays up and just then his
“cough” (we know that meant he
had tuberculosis and was liable to die any moment) flares up and he expires.

Immediately Cora throws Letty out of their home, and Letty tells Wirt Roddy
she’s now ready to accept his marriage proposal — only Wirt breaks the news to
her that though he’d previously proposed to her, he can’t marry her because
he’s already married, but he’s willing to take her in anyway. Letty makes it
clear both to him and to us, with the stoniest expressions of which Lillian
Gish is capable, that she’s not that
kind of girl, and with Lige and Sourdough (the comic-relief character that
undoubtedly would have been played by Walter Brennan if this had been made in
the 1930’s — which I found myself wishing it had been: had the silent version
done better perhaps MGM would have
remade it, and I know who they should have remade it with: Barbara Stanwyck,
who actually did play a similar
story in the 1933 film So Big, as
Letty and Clark Gable as Lige) having fought to a draw, she ultimately accepts
Lige’s proposal — only to turn off instantly when he rather violently tries to
have sex with her on the wedding night, leading him to promise that he’ll never
touch her again. Matters rest this uneasily until the big “norther,” the bigger
and nastier wind than any we’ve seen in the film so far, comes up and Letty
ends up trapped in the cabin not with Lige, but with Wirt Roddy, who apparently
takes advantage of her while she’s unconscious (Lillian Gish’s characters never gave up their virginity lightly!), and later on
she’s hunkered down in the cabin at the height of the “norther” and someone
tries to get in. Thinking it’s Lige, she opens the door — and it’s Wirt: she
pulls a gun on him, he reaches for it, and just when we think on the basis of a
thousand other movies that he’s going to get the gun away from her and she’ll
be worse off than before, she pulls the trigger and he’s shot twice where, to
borrow a line from another legendary diva-driven film, his heart ought to have been. In her opening commentary
Gish was still bitching that the original ending — Letty wanders out into the
desert and essentially kills herself by exposing herself to the full fury of
the super-wind — had, at the behest of MGM’s exhibitors, been changed to an
unconvincing reconciliation between her and Lige in which Lige says she acted
justly in killing Wirt, the two of them end up in a clinch and Letty tells him
that she now loves not only him but the wind as well.

Director Victor Seastrom
(who had helmed The Scarlet Letter
as well and who was Swedish; his original last name was “Sjöstrom” but MGM
changed it to something that would be less intimidating to an American audience
trying to read his credit) does the best he can with that ending, which Gish
bravely plays and makes a good deal more believable than Katharine Hepburn was
able to when her films had her
abandon her feminism and be a good little wife to the scapegrace male
protagonist at the end, but the film as a whole is brilliant: vividly directed,
expertly written (at least by Marion: the “rustic” misspellings in John
Colton’s titles, supposedly representing the “rural” accents with which the
characters speak, get pretty oppressive at times), perfectly acted and, as
Charles said, a film that seems to be dramatizing the subconscious rather than
just depicting events. Gish recalled that The Wind was the greatest physical challenge of her career:
the winds themselves were provided by huge airplane engines and the location
(in and around Bakersfield, California) was so sandy that the cast and crew
members had to wear scarves around their heads and protective goggles over
their eyes at all times — and every time Gish had to doff her goggles to appear
on camera, she feared for the safety of her eyes. They escaped the shoot
unscathed but her hands didn’t: she made the mistake of grasping the metal door
handle on one of the trailers and ended up badly burned from the 120° heat and
its effect on the metal. The Wind
was a financial flop and Thalberg blamed Seastrom, who had directed the smash
hit He Who Gets Slapped in 1924
(the first film actually released under the MGM banner) but whose subsequent
films had lost the studio money; Seastrom finished the movie he was working on
(A Lady to Love, an early film
version of Sidney Howard’s play They Knew What They Wanted with Vilma Banky and Edward G. Robinson) but then
went home to Sweden and abandoned his directorial career in 1937, becoming an
actor and appearing as the old professor in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild
Strawberries (1957), his final credit
before his death three years later.

A number of factors probably influenced
this film’s commercial failure: for one thing, it was a silent and in 1928 the
talkie revolution was riding roughshod over the film industry — The
Wind got great reviews from critics and a
number of them said it was proof that the silent cinema was actually superior
to the sound cinema in terms of artistic quality, but it wasn’t the sort of
artistic quality moviegoers were interested in in 1928. Then, too, even with
that tacked-on happy ending The Wind
is an incredibly depressing movie, and all the skill of Gish, writer Marion and
director Seastrom at plunging us into an awareness of Letty’s plight and the
depressingly few options she has being stuck in this crazy environment just
makes it that much more of a downer. Charles thought The Wind was one movie that really suffered more than most
from being shown on TV and that it would be even more impressive in a theatre
(and I’d love to see it
theatrically, especially with a live musical accompaniment; the reissue score
by Carl Davis is acceptable enough and avoids some of the pitfalls of current
attempts to re-score silent films, including the anachronistic and sometimes
screechy instruments used, while a wind machine is going virtually throughout
the movie and subliminally adds to the visual expressions of the wind’s effect
on the characters and their environment), and also I’d be interested in reading
Dorothy Scarborough’s novel and in particular I’m curious whether she wrote it
in a straightforward descriptive style or in a prose style with a similar sense
of symbolism and stylization to the visual mise-en-scène Seastrom brought to the film. (I still remember
Charles loaning me the novel Diva
and finding that, though the book and the film are quite close plot-wise, the
book is a plainly written thriller with no prose equivalent to the richly symbolic and dense imagery of the
movie.)

Still, The Wind is one of
the true classics of the silent era, a movie well worth seeing if you can
handle silent films at all, and among the things that make it great are the
understated performances: by 1928 actors in prestige movies like this weren’t
using the annoying gestures of earlier years — the ones people who’ve never
seen a silent film start to finish tend to believe all silents were acted like: the eye-rolling and
windmill-like arm motions of the villains, the coy body language and
eyebrow-fluttering of the heroines, the camera-charging of the stalwart heroes.
Gish’s acting in particular underscores the truth behind the famous line in the
Charles Brackett/Billy Wilder/D. M. Marshman script for Sunset
Boulevard — “We didn’t need dialogue; we
had faces!” — even though the
severity of her performance was one aspect of this movie that probably put 1928
audiences off. Gish had fallen from popularity around the same time as her
mentor, D. W. Griffith, and for largely the same reason: her attachment, at
least on screen, to the strict code of Victorian morality no doubt seemed
old-fashioned in a country whose movie audience was embracing Clara Bow and
other actresses (including the young Joan Crawford) who were visibly unafraid
of men or sex, and what Bow’s fans saw as female liberation only disgusted Gish
both off-screen and on (in later years, as the mores of motion pictures
loosened up, Gish gave a series of interviews telling how much she hated this
development).